Britpop and the English Music TraditionProfessor Andy Bennett, Professor Jon Stratton Britpop and the English Music Tradition is the first study devoted exclusively to the Britpop phenomenon and its contexts. The genre of Britpop, with its assertion of Englishness, evolved at the same time that devolution was striking deep into the hegemonic claims of English culture to represent Britain. It is usually argued that Britpop, with its strident declarations of Englishness, was a response to the dominance of grunge. The contributors in this volume take a different point of view: that Britpop celebrated Englishness at a time when British culture, with its English hegemonic core, was being challenged and dismantled. It is now timely to look back on Britpop as a cultural phenomenon of the 1990s that can be set into the political context of its time, and into the cultural context of the last fifty years – a time of fundamental revision of what it means to be British and English. |
Contents
Music Hall and the Commercialization of English Popular Music | 11 |
Skiffle Variety and Englishness | 27 |
Englishing Popular Music in the 1960s | 41 |
The Gendered History of Britpop | 57 |
Britpop Traces 19701980 | 71 |
Labouring the Point? The Politics of Britpop inNew Britain | 89 |
The Britpop Sound | 103 |